When I learned about SEO and blogging and how to focus my keywords, I went from the bottom of page 4 to the top of page 1 in six weeks and so I mean, the competition in most areas for counselors is really low!

Don’t forget, you can hear all five days and download the whole book, transcripts, and walk through over at www.WebsiteRoundtable.com

Website Roundtable Bios

Joseph R. Sanok

Aaron Carpenter

Aaron Carpenter owns Legendary Lion Web Design. They’re based out of Traverse City, Michigan and do custom web development. They try to give people the most value for their coin on making custom website applications.

Perry Rosenbloom

Perry Rosenbloom is the founder of Brighter Vision. Brighter Vision is an all-in-one website solution for therapists so they build therapists’ websites that look like they’ve spent a few thousand dollars but in fact only cost them $59 a month. They do a fully custom website for you, with support and all of your SEO, for just a low monthly cost.

If you want the full transcripts, screenshots, and checklists to help you start building your counseling website, click the image below and we’ll email you the 50 page e-book for free!

Scroll Below for Today’s How to Start a Website Transcript about blogging for beginners

DAY 4 Blogging for Beginners to Attract Clients

All right, here we go into Chapter 4. In this chapter, we’re going to be diving into blogging and attracting clients.

For me blogging and attracting clients like this is one of the things that is so underutilized in the counseling space but seems to make such a splash in regards to how well you rank on Google.

When I learned about SEO and blogging and how to focus my keywords, I went from the bottom of page 4 to the top of page 1 in six weeks and so I mean, the competition in most areas for counselors is really low!

Blogging 101

Blogging helps:

1. Establish that you are an expert

2. You rank higher in Google

I just got a very honest email from someone, she said, “I want to start blogging, but I don’t know how to start without feeling that I am doing a term paper. What should a therapist blog about?”

Here are a few tips:

Think about your ideal client

Who is connected to that person?

What would help that person?

Blog Examples:

For example, if you help kids with behavioral issues and their families, here are some blog posts you could do:

A step-parent’s guide to discipline

A parent’s guide to behavior issues

Seven things most principals get wrong when they talk about kid’s behavior

A new teacher’s guide to classroom management (how to get “that kid” to settle down)

9 Unexpected ways to help middle schoolers calm down

Why screen time isn’t that bad

I could go on and on, but you get the point. Here are some videos that will really help you in your blogging:

Sure, blogging for beginners is important for your website for a variety of reasons. Probably the most valuable reasons are its implications for how well your website ranks on any given phrase.

Basically, the rule of thumb is that if you want to have people be able to search and find you, you need to have a page on that thing. When we think about blogging as it applies to that, what we’re really looking at is like you’ve seen them before. You know, if you’re getting ready to make your website, it’s like top three reasons why blah-blah-blah. If someone searches that and you have an article on that and nobody else does, then they’re going to land on your site, most likely.

That makes blogging really important because you’re adding different subject matter to your website and all things being equal, if nobody else has a page on that or if your page, your website loads faster in the 400 Google-ranking factors, is a prize winner, you’re going to get that served up. If you don’t have that blog post, you won’t receive that traffic. It’s really important for that.

Another component that makes it important is if you’re doing it right, you’re providing blog posts that give value to your audience, without really asking for a whole lot in return.

You’re trying to help them solve their problems; especially as a therapist, give them some strategies and things they can try to do on their own, starting to build credibility with them, and if they’re looking at you as a possible option for hiring you, and you’ve already established credibility because they’ve tried a couple of things that you talked about, it’s worked, then they are that much more likely to actually call you and hire you because that’s what I think it’s for.

Yeah, I think that a kind of practical example of that is you know, say someone works with kids that have ADHD. Then asking yourself:

“Who are all the people that are in this kid’s life”?

Then you could write, “A principal’s guide to ADHD”

“A Teacher’s Guide to ADHD”

“A Parent’s Guide”

“A Step-parent’s Guide”

“A Grandparent’s Guide”

You know, if you create five or six resources for all the people that surround this client that you’re going to start to rank and then that’s highly shareable, too, you know. I mean, if a principal’s like, “Holy cow! This really helped me” and then here she shares it with other principals then you’re going to be known pretty quickly as the ADHD counselor for kids, if that’s who you want to focus your clientele on. That idea of creating content that’s really valuable is I think so important when you’re blogging.

Keyword Tools

What are some of the tools you know, that really help with kind of keywords?

Yoast: Our favorite SEO tool or SEO plug-in for WordPress and start writing an article on that. Basically, at the end of a page or a blogpost, you can put in what the keyword is that you want to rank for. So say it’s “depression test”. You can then change the meta description, which I don’t think we talked about that on the Definition Day, but the meta description is on Google when you see like a blogpost then it shows that two sentences or so of what it’s about, you can then write: This depression test is all about these items.And then what I appreciate, as a none like website IT guy, is that Yoast then gives you a red-yellow or green color for your keyword as to how good it’s going to probably rank or how optimized that page is.

Google: One of the greatest and most underutilized tool is Google itself. So if you go into Google and you’d start typing a phrase, you’re going to get that Google auto suggest and what Google is telling you is, “Hey, these are kinds of things that people search for.” So if you’re writing an article on you know a specific topic, you can start typing in things you think people might search for and Google will auto suggest other suggestions that are related to it. Yeah. Like I’m just right now typing in “depression” so that the next thing after “depression” is “depression test”, “depression symptoms”, “depression definition”, and “depressing quotes”.

spyfu.com: One website I like going to is take the top result and go to SpyFu. Put that URL in and it will tell you some of the top things that it ranks for, top keywords it ranks for.

SEOUltimate: The advantage to SEO Ultimate is that it has a utility called the “Deep link juggernaut” which sounds really intimidating. It is actually really cool if you plan on doing a lot of blogging. And what this tool is, is you can put in a phrase that you know you already wrote a page for and write basically what that phrase is and then add a link to that page that you’ve written about that phrase. And it will, every time it loads a page on your site, automatically link any time that you reference that right back to that page. For SEO, that generates a lot more internal links which are really important because it shows like you know, you’re being useful like allowing people to navigate from one page to another. It does actually make it more useful for your clients. You can also manage whether or not certain pages don’t have that. So you just don’t end up with random links on your homepage, for instance.

WordPressJetpack: Jetpack stops bloat on your website, it is like extending your website. If you’re doing this on your own, your first instinct’s going to be, “Oh, I want to add this and that and the other thing” and I would advise not to do that. The more plug-ins that you add, the more bloat, as Perry had pointed out, you’ll get. It takes longer for your pages to load because it has to run through more code with all of those plug-ins. WordPress Jetpack is kind of nifty because it has something like 36 different modules that are very commonly used or required in WordPress installations that extend the website in different ways. And you can tell whether or not they are on or off. I found it to be very like a Swiss Army knife to add on to a project if you’ve bootstrapping a project.

Getting People to Your Website

So the idea there being that you can of course hire an SEO specialist or try to learn what you can do about SEO as one component of a fully comprehensive marketing plan. Your website should be just one tool to help you get clients get introduced to clients and everything. How will people find you?

Can you add your domain to your business card?

Can you put rack cards up somewhere?

Or do you have any public speaking events where you can include your website as you speak?

Do you plan on doing a podcast, for instance?

Those are great ways to direct traffic back to your website and you really should be thinking about all the different ways and make sure that they’re reasonable ways that people would want to come to your website to get something useful which again, may point back to your blog, for instance.